Dive Brief:
- Medicare may penalize hospitals with high admission rates based on patients they serve, concluded a study posted online in JAMA Internal Medicine.
- The study authors reviewed 8,067 admissions from Health and Retirement Study data and linked Medicare claims for HRS participants enrolled in Medicare who were hospitalized from 2009 to 2012.
- According to the researchers, 22 of 29 patient characteristics assessed significantly predicted readmission “beyond standard adjustments.”
Dive Insight:
According to the researchers, 17 of the 29 patient characteristics were dispersed differently in hospitals within the highest and lowest quintiles of publicly-reported hospital-wide readmission rates. Of those characteristics, 16 indicated participants admitted to hospitals in the highest readmission rate quintile were “more likely to have characteristics that were associated with a higher probability of readmission.”
The researchers found 48% of the difference between hospital readmission rates can be attributed to factors such as education and income, reports The Hill.
“Patient characteristics not included in Medicare’s current risk-adjustment methods explained much of the difference in readmission risk between patients admitted to hospitals with higher [versus] lower readmission rates,” the researchers concluded.